Shibo
Member
From: South Dakota, USA
Registered: 2008-01-19
Posts: 132
Hey guys! Quick question.. I know we all have our catastrophic days reviewing, I'm no different. Do any of you have any sort of cutoff, like "If my reviews ever get below xx% consistently, I'm gonna slow the pace down here.."? My number in the back of my mind has always been "under 80%". This happens occasionally but usually not more than once in a 1 or 2 week timeframe. I can deal with that, as my retention is always better the next day and tends to stay in the mid to high 80's. I've thought to myself that if I ever hit, I dunno, 3 or 4 days under 80% in a row, I'd probably slow down my pace or re-evaluate.. I'm at just under 1300 kanji now, so the thought of slowing down is repulsive. I hope I don't get to that point but I think about it quite often. I enjoy my 20 kanji per day pace and I hope it never overwhelms me. Thoughts?
Savara
Member
From: London
Registered: 2007-09-08
Posts: 104
Website
On a given day my recall is usually between 72~85 %, which I'm ok with because I can easily deal with the failed kanji at the same day. I tend to ignore the %'s altogether, as long as I'm dealing with it, still adding new material and I can get rid of the failed kanji the same day it's fine.
But at the same time I'm thinking this might be my weak spot, by marking the failed kanji of the day 'learned' after just a few hours, there's a big chance I'll fail them again the next time I see them, or the time after that. If I'd keep them until the next day, recall might go up a bit. But I hate seeing "XX Failed kanji" so I try to get rid of them as soon as possible.
And in a way, I guess I'm thinking "Well, it's not a big problem if my recall rate isn't that good now, in a month I'll have finished the book and I won't be adding new kanji for quite some time so eventually it will be fine."
Jarvik7
Member
From: 名古屋
Registered: 2007-03-05
Posts: 3946
Whenever I have a bad review session, it's because I didn't properly review the kanji the previous day, not because I've done too many. As long as I do a quick quiz of the kanji a few hours after studying them I'll get a review score in the 90%s the next day, regardless of how many new characters I do (I did about 160 in one day the other day without issue).
Last edited by Jarvik7 (2008 May 23, 5:15 pm)
rich_f
Member
From: north carolina
Registered: 2007-07-12
Posts: 1708
Look at the list of all kanji you've learned, then sort it by how many times you've failed certain characters. If you fail certain characters a lot, then you should probably re-evaluate the mnemonic you're using for those characters. That can be a lot more useful sometimes than worry about retention rate.
But look at your retention rate as the overall effectiveness of your study technique. It's okay for it to fluctuate a bit, but if it's consistently low, you might want to consider spending more time learning each character, or spend more time visualizing characters, or just analyze your overall approach to learning the characters. Some people can breeze through RTK in a month, but those people are the exception. So don't press so hard if you can't remember anything. (Because if you can't remember something, have you really learned it? 
)
Then too, there are certain characters that will always give us trouble. I can think of about a dozen or so that I chronically fail... for some reason they just don't sink in, no matter what. I simply identify those repeat offenders, and let brute force and time do its work. (Because coming up with 4-5 different stories, no matter how graphic, sometimes just doesn't work.)
Nukemarine
Member
From: 神奈川
Registered: 2007-07-15
Posts: 2347
You're going to be switching it up as you go along. I took different approaches throughout last year when this was happening. Here were some of my takes:
For the reviewing process:
1. Review only until you get a certain number missed. Then move onto studying a certain number of missed kanji then new kanji. Not a good tactic as you want to review kanji that are active before worrying about new and missed kanji.
2. Review all my due cards. Review X number of missed cards, if theres no miss cards to make up X, then add in new cards to fill that void. The reviewing of due cards was good. Studying a DEFINITE number of missed cards was good. Limiting my new cards to the amount of missed cards turned out a bad decision as I was going through the book slower.
3. Final process (I kept this till the end). Review ALL due cards, this was very important. Study (as in look at the story, update as needed) X number of missed cards (I think I was doing 30 missed cards a day). Initial study and review of new cards (usually around 30 a day).
Now, I had a HUGE missed stack that approached 400. However, I was constantly going through the book. This meant that I was getting Kanji that I was not missing (and not being in the missed stack). In addition, the missed kanji stack kept dwindling over time. Once I added that last batch of kanji, I added the number of missed kanji I'd review a day (I think it was 50, then went down over time so now it's empty the stack). Process three was the winner for me, but may not be so for others. Moral: Review all due cards, study a definite number of missed cards, add a certain number of new cards every day.
What to do if you begin missing ALOT:
Miss them. Don't sweat it. What's may be happening is your stories are showing their weakness. When you review missed cards, treat them seriously. Look at the story and see if it really is bringing out the visual image it's meant to. Alter it if need be. Again, look at the story. Turn your eyes off of the monitor, think of the story and the keyword and write out the kanji again as you visualize the story. Write down the kanji. Review done, go to the next card.
Trust me, you find out that mnemonic that seemed so easy isn't so great as the keyword is not bringing it to mind. Change that mnemonic to a visual story. That's what happened to many of my kanji. I was using another's stories, but slowly chose my own visual stories for most.
